Category: Flash fiction

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The Return

For what might have been a month, after passing through the gates of Horn with their intricate filigrees of beasts and battles, they camped at the foot of the mountain. There in what they thought was a true heart-wood glade, they pitched their tents and tethered their tired horses. 

With charcoal from the fire and sticks of finely pressed colour that they had carried with them, they covered every part of their shelters in what they could remember of the language of their intentions. And yet, despite those careful efforts, each night outside the circle of the fire that which was unknown still moved among the trees, seemingly intent on testing, then breaching the camp’s boundaries. 

In the repetition of those dark hours, their ability to rest also became elusive. Instead, there were drifting fragments and patterns that plagued the corners of their unfocused eyes: then often, having reached an almost feverish point of exhaustion, each would suffer sudden agonising spasms in the muscles of their legs or at their throats; and all, apparently, without clear reason. 

Time itself did not move there properly either. If they could have caught its passing in some tangible form, it would have been as a sketch of a bird with damaged wings that rising up from the page, would slowly drag itself across the clearing, finally to hide somewhere deep among the discoloured bracken and detritus of the forest floor.

 

She had been working on the idea for some time now; insofar as time could be determined. It was about the appropriate forms, a choice of intricate rituals with which they might manage to honour their dead. He had been an older man than the others but still he seemed  in good health. When he collapsed on the strand by the river that sunlit morning they were all surprised; and even more so as despite all they could do, he coughed and choked and shook his way toward a final end. 

They found they could not bury his body there: the strand itself was rocky and the sand beneath far too hard and compact for digging. Instead they contrived a kind of litter from an old blanket and some hastily cut timber; and dragging behind his horse he had made the first part of that journey back with them.

Someone had found a jar of pale honey in their saddle bags. At the edge of the clearing there grew a large clumps of bitter smelling herb or weed. They tore off handfuls of the plant and mixed the two with some of their now brackish water, then soaked the blanket and tightly wrapped the body. Then they hoisted it to their shoulders and gently carried it to the western edge of the glade. There they laid it down in a drift of leaves where the shadows of the wood would always deny a passage for the sun.

When they returned, she was hunched on a flat stone by the fire; and without moving, she called out to all of them quite clearly: 

“He deserves to be farewelled: but I think that somehow, at all costs he must be kept from the gates of Ivory”.

“What are you suggesting? He cannot return”, Roland replied from where he now stood,  just behind her: ”there is no resurrection of the body in its last corruption”.

“How can we really know?”, she said: “here in this place of so many edges, even that might just become possible”.

Without replying, Roland turned on his own boot heel and left her there alone. Having no obvious thought for any other occupation, she again began to pursue her own thoughts: and by that mental effort, she found the strength to make other,  more complicated additions to her drawings.

Finally,  having found nothing and understood nothing, they broke camp and left that forest on the side of the mountain by passing once more through those self-same gates of Horn.

Time is passing … and now had passed …

The clearing is empty, and sans their now cold fire pit, unchanged. A wind begins to blow: picking up speed it animates the drifts of leaves at the forest’s edges.

The drowsing corpse, having been uncovered, lifts itself up, and shaking off the blanket, rolls onto its side. Its eyes, fixed on the path that leads to the gates of Ivory, are wide open and unblinking:  it supports the weight of its pale head with one of its withered arms …

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Nowhere in Particular

Three hundred or so dusty red kilometres up the Western Highway from the coast, and about five kilometres from the turn off to Lizard Drinking, lies the small outback settlement of Yakult.  It’s only claim to fame is that it was named by some exhausted minor German explorer who camped there for a few nights while ostensibly searching for the fabled Australian inland sea. Eager perhaps to leave at least some sign that his expedition had passed that way, on departing he reportedly nailed a small commemorative pewter plate to a large gum. “Frederick Grossendum, Yakult, 1863”.

“Call me Jim”, said the barman, as he laid the paperback he had been reading face down on the counter and slipped off the stool to stand behind his bar:  “What will you have?” On the wall behind him, tacked in among the dusty spirit bottles, a large yellowing piece of card announced prices for the available fare.

Mike inspected it carefully before he answered: “seeing its eleven am in the morning, we thought we might be able to get some breakfast?”

“Surely” says Jim, “not a problem. It’s not as if we’re too rushed at the present anyway”. He reached down beneath the taps and retrieved what looked like a child’s toy walkie-talkie. He put it next to his ear; there was a sharp click and a crackle and then he began speaking: “Ma, Ma, are yer there?”

Stay tuned — there will be more …

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Bodhisattva

One of my male housemates is getting fat. He’s blowing up like a coloured party balloon. Before most of us are even conscious in the morning, he’s up boy scouting King Street and the other byways of Newtown for his big breakfast.Enmore Road with its shawarmas and exotic bread pizzas; or maybe a seat in the bar over a schooner and a plate piled high with roast meats, green beans, gravy and potatoes. He is a staunch friend to the Crispy Inn, the late night coffee shops with their cakes behind neon frosted glass, the charcoal chicken joints and the Asian takeaways. To him the culinary possibilities of South Sydney seem to be endless. You’d think he was attempting a fast-track degree in gastronomy and not comparative religion. You might forgive him if the remaining hours of his days were truly dedicated to his original chosen discipline; but here’s the rub: he got stuck on page one hundred and forty-two of the set text; the chapter on Buddhism. So now, “paradoxically”, he’s also undergone an eastern epiphany and has developed what could only be described as the full-blown “Gautama complex”.

What the F is that? You may ask. Well, in a big cloud of ignorance about what his own roots might just have to offer, between his ironic body building pursuits, he now haunts the various Buddhist outlets and book shops along the strip. He also grandly attends meditation and eastern self-help courses, and spends days in his bedroom with a big plastic bottle of Coke, a canister of Pringles and a half-bitten paintbrush, decorating his walls with multi-coloured  mandalas.

It really is so sad. When he first arrived in our terrace as a younger, slimmer, version of himself, I actually somewhat fancied him. But now under the influence of his new vocation, his idea of flirting has devolved into veiled references to the Karma Sutra and occasional awkward conversations that are undertaken as he hangs by one hairy hand from the frame of my door.

But I think not, my young rapidly self-expanding chela; this girl is no poorly clad Devi standing on one leg with bovine, adoring eyes just for you. Instead I’m kicking back in the communal living room, comfortable on the couch. And between late night episodes of The Vampire Diaries, Rock Wiz, and Rage, I’m observing with some sickly fascination as your waistline overflows your shorts and creeps gently toward your crotch.

So even after a smoke or two, your No. 1 newly shaved head is no attraction. Rather, I see in my mind’s eye your extreme saffron days approaching; but it’s not the fierce aestheticism of an Indian master that’s shaping your last beatific image. Oh no; it’s the smiling tele-tubby, he who sits crossed-legged and smiling, drenched in his own cloud of stupefying incense. The happy, dimpled, obese One, that those clever Chinese artists seem to prefer.
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The Time Tourists

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Still sequestered incognito at Main Beach just south of Brisbane, Ray was exhausted. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Christmas Night had all passed him by without much notice as he feverishly read the Hesse Papers through to their conclusion; but the last page of the manuscript came and went without him still fully understanding the relationships between the Coast of Gold, the Contessa, and the Tunnel of Time.

He lay back in the chair on the balcony of the rented Condo feeling defeated: it was all he could think to do, to reach out for the mobile handset and order in: one of those very expensive pizzas in the hospitality folder and a very cheap bottle of wine. After he had polished both off, he drifted slowly into a kind of hot, after dinner sleep.

The light was dying on all the roads of the world and the breeze from the east streaming in across the pacific started to pick up. Restlessly, Ray began to dream …

It seems Ray Hardly, the Gum Shoe Private Detective has disappeared: but that’s not entirely uncharacteristic of his modus operandi. His comings and goings to and from his office above Salon Dread Heads in Newtown have never been anything but consistently erratic. What has his occasional girlfriend and salon owner Bridget Pantaloon perplexed is not the effort she will have to put in reporting him as a missing person, but  his last, overly cryptic text:

Don’t weight up sweetheart – a meet with the Big Man **%! Closing in on the Contessa. 100 K Jim … Friday AM.

So B is sleeping tonight with a pick axe handle under her pillow. She’s worried that this one could just be Ray’s biggest and most disastrously stupid case yet …

The Time Tourists: a Ray Hardly Mystery; Simeon & Shyster 2018.

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Glancing Back

Always there are the moments we never seem
to forget: the sweat sad ghosts of sweet
rave nights, and screwed down cigarettes.

I remember that I spent at least three mildly angst-ridden years, during what was I think an indifferent kind of youth, keeping company with a somewhat pretty, dark-haired young woman who could never make up her mind.  This girl used so much grass you could have nick named her “couch”. Sitting cross-legged on her rumpled bed, eyes glazed, and her sweet mouth splitting from five different types of grins, she would roll out endless plans for the both of us; fat roaches full of choices, the discussion of which was best not refused.

But then again, she was a fanatic vegetarian who eschewed the flesh of this world in favour of kidney beans and herbal teas. She forced me on occasions to imbibe foul-tasting comfrey when I had raging flu or simple colds, always breakfasted on the lounge room floor on Vegemite and toast, and encouraged me in the habit of tobacco – an addiction I have till this day.

So, after I was firmly hooked on her and our love affair, she decided to give up smoking herself. I was then berated for months on end as to the state of my own health. She still kept using the drugs though and wanted at one precious, lost moment, to have our child. We were to escape to the outback of country New South Wales, city life at that time of legend being the epitome of the evils of the later twentieth century.

For the purposes of this short fiction, let’s call her Cat. She was enrolled at New South Wales University for a time, studying economic history and complaining endlessly about the Basser Steps. For those who like exact geography, they run in the open uphill from the top of College Road past the Basser College, and on to University Walk and the centre of the Campus itself. In those days gone by they were more commonly referred to as “the idiot stairs”. If you venture on them wearing a wraparound dress and carrying a string bag full of books and your pencils, you can’t quite get up a proper striding rhythm as you walk. It’s really no better in a suit with a fountain pen; in shorts and thongs with a biro, or in jeans either – one and one half steps or strides on and off, all the way to the top. Cat always claimed that making this improbable journey a couple of days a week gave her the idea for her doctoral thesis topic. Of course, she never managed to complete even the undergraduate degree – that was as I remember, the winningness of Cat.

Finally, and painfully, our time having been spent, we parted ways. Some years afterward, when I returned from a long sojourn overseas, I heard she had married and then wound up somewhere out west in the dry baked back blocks of the bush. But it’s been still more years than I feel like really counting now, and I have never heard another whisper of Cat.

Underneath it all though, I know I still miss the girl. I don’t use myself anymore and have more or less left off the gentle sport of drinking, but as I’ve said I still smoke; and it’s in fact really the century after our time. In the passing decades, I’ve managed to finish my own mostly useless degree, travelled a bit more, and had a purely accidental career of sorts in the City. Finally, I have collapsed back into the old habits once again – long, idle days of gossip, the questionable pursuit of art through occasional scribblings like this, and the reading of too many dog-eared books.

Anyway, I have another splendid, loyal girl now who loves me in the real world. I find myself living in sunny, inner city Erskineville – a short uphill stroll from King Street in the precarious republic of Newtown – and it’s almost a peaceful, productive kind of life at that. Then I go on some days to think I am in truth, just deep down, some sort of failed, aged urban hippie. And then, living maybe in what amounts to “an after-dinner sleep” (something that happens to often these days after a good cafe lunch), I often without any particular purpose still find myself dreaming of the distant country and Cat.

I should say that the idea for this current diatribe came to me as I sat on the stone wall of a planter bed by the rubbish bin in the square, outside of the Bakery on Erskineville road. It was a late autumn afternoon – warm, with a slight chill hidden in the evening’s approaching shadows. I was idly watching the grumbling traffic and the other passers-by. Grey Trilby, greying hair shaved back to the skull; a t-shirt and knee-length shorts; an ear-ring stuck jauntily in my left ear. I was also, of course, smoking yet another endless, hand-rolled, sneaky cigarette. The title of that unwritten economic history thesis? Would you like to know? It was “Urbanisation and the decline of the village idiot”. Funny that.

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Dormivegilia

 

For what might have been a month, after passing through the gates of Horn with their intricate filigrees of beasts and battles, they camped at the foot of the mountain. There in what they thought was a true heart-wood glade, they pitched their tents and tethered their tired horses.

With charcoal from the fire and sticks of finely pressed colour that they had carried with them, they covered every part of their shelters in what they could remember of the language of their intentions. And yet, despite those careful efforts, each night outside the circle of the fire that which was unknown still moved among the trees, seemingly intent on testing, then breaching the camp’s boundaries.

In the repetition of those dark hours, their ability to rest also became elusive. Instead, there were drifting fragments and patterns that plagued the corners of their unfocused eyes: then often, having reached an almost feverish point of exhaustion, each would suffer sudden agonising spasms in the muscles of their legs or at their throats; and all, apparently, without clear reason.

Time itself did not move there properly either. If they could have caught its passing in some tangible form, it would have been as a sketch of a bird with damaged wings that rising up from the page, would slowly drag itself across the clearing, finally to hide somewhere deep among the discoloured bracken and detritus of the forest floor.

Dormevegilia
(ital.) (n.) the space that stretches between sleeping and waking